Wireless network technologies are commonly and widely used in nowadays. In order to provide better qualities of service and wider communication ranges between the wireless apparatus, the concept of relay node has been introduced in network systems. The purpose of deploying relay node in network system is to extend the serving coverage of base station; hence, user equipment which is not within the communication coverage of base node can access the services provided by relay node as well via base node.
However, in some developing network systems, the hardware modules, protocols and communicating procedures for the network architectures with multi-hop relay nodes are not efficiently developed yet. Particularly, in long term evolution (LTE) or long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) network systems, there is no suitable protocol yet for introducing multi-hop relay nodes.
Therefore, since LTE/LTE-A are significant network systems nowadays, improved proposals of the hardware modules, protocols and communication procedures for multi-hop relay nodes used in the LTE/LTE-A network systems are needed.